The World Wide Web (Web) has been ever growing and rapidly expanding since its inception. Additionally, since the widespread household use of personal computers, the Web has gained popularity among consumers and casual users. Thus, it is no surprise that the Web has become an enormous repository of data, containing various kinds of valuable semantic information about real-world entities, such as people, organizations, and locations. For example, many Web documents available through the Internet may contain information about real-world relationships that exist between people, groups, and/or places. Unfortunately, these relationships may not always be automatically discoverable, automatically identified, or even searchable.
In many cases, these relationships may only be manually detected. However, due to the amount of data currently available over the Web, manual entry of such relationship identification would be too time consuming to allow for the effective creation of a web-scale relationship graph. Yet, such a graph would be invaluable for searching previously undiscoverable and, thus, un-extractable relationship information.
Unfortunately, adequate tools do not exist for effectively detecting and extracting entity relationship information from the Web. Existing extraction tools merely identify and extract information based on pre-specified relations and relation-specific human-tagged examples. Accordingly, there is a need for relationship extraction systems and methods that are robust enough to identify new relationships and handle Web-scale amounts of data.